Week 7: Cultural Codes and Reading to Write

Though I found this entire chapter useful, the section I’ve been most thinking about is the one concerning cultural codes. I’ve noticed this as a problem for my own Interpretation of Literature students and for some of my writing center students. In both Interpretation of Lit and Rhetoric, historical/cultural context poses a huge stumbling block for students. After all, how can you effectively analyze what a text is saying/doing if you’re considering it entirely removed from any sense of intended audience or the cultural code and system from which it was produced? This kept coming up recently when working with a Rhetoric student in the writing center. He was trying to analyze a series of 19^th century war images, but he didn’t know anything about the specific war they were depicting or who the original audience was for the images.

I’ve tried to improve my own approach to this issue in teaching Gen Ed Lit. The first semester I taught, I assigned Angels in America. We discussed the AIDS crisis a bit, but I realized as the unit progressed that the students needed much more context than I had anticipated. And this wasn’t just an issue of them not knowing political facts. Plot points became confusing for them, because they didn’t have the necessary knowledge pertaining to medications (AZT) and how they were dispersed, for example. Since then, I’ve tried to give students access to the necessary contextual information. I’ve also tried to help direct some of their reading with this information. For example, we just read The Turn of the Screw. On the first class, I presented them with information on the role of the Victorian governess and how she was socially perceived and discussed. This then helped guide and focus their reading of the novel as they considered each day how the main character corresponded to those ideas laid out in that initial presentation (thereby seeing how the novel may be in conversation with ideas of the time).

Connected to all of this, I was also really struck by Bean’s assertion that it can be helpful to tell students, “There are passages in it that I don’t fully understand myself” (169). I started to do with with Angels in America a couple of years ago (because it’s true). This text is almost always my students’ favorite by the end of the semester. There could be a lot of reasons for that, but I wonder if one of them is because I so heavily stress that I’m also struggling to understand and grapple with the text myself.